I hated climbing Mitzadah. Of the forty-some-odd of us that trudged up, I was the last one. I sat down to drink at the top and fell asleep immediately.

Once we were up there, though. My God. It's just too cool. 

I have been to the wall probably three or four times. I love it as a historical site. As part of my history, clearly this is one the most important historical sites in the world, not to mention the former site of an architectural wonder. Beyond that, it pisses me off.



I hate looking at the women's section. Quiet and cramped.



I don't like the notes either. Why should God listen any more intently to a note slipped in a wall in Israel than to a whispered prayer here in Madison, NJ?



 

My first and only experience so far with Israel was considerably longer than a birthright trip. I spent a four month semester on what seemed at times to be a progaganda-heavy trip. Don't believe anything they tell you. Not that me telling you that will change anything. You're already not totally on board with them.

As you drive around in that tour bus and look out the window at the landspace and as you meet Israelis and chat with them and as you watch Israeli tv and listen Israeli music, you'll work out your own sense of where the hell you are and what in God's name you're doing there. 

I've seen Knocked Up twice now. Once in the afternoon at a kind of artsy theatre with mostly arsty adults in the audience. They got the pop culture refs. Then I saw it in the middle of the night at a big cineplex with mostly other teens and early twenty-something big state college types. They did not get the pop culture refs.

I'm willing to believe that the chars in the movie are different on pop culture not because of gender, but because of the suburbs. The women in the movie are nice, tame, women whose ambition is to live in the suburbs. The men, however, are from a different subculture in which pop culture literacy is paramount.